Show HN: I made a website for you to travel the world in first-person POV

This is awesome. Wasted far too much time on it already!

Tried clicking source and got an error:

https://www.explordle.comhttps//www.youtube.com/watch?v=qArF... not found

Thank you, this is great! One thing - I'm not in USA, and only people in USA, I guess, know those two-letter state abbreviations. I got one where I had to choose based on two two-letter codes I didn't know. Using the whole state name would make it more international.

Reminds me a lot of GeoGuessr [0], particularly the videos that top competitors make, such as Tom Davies who goes by the moniker GeoWizard [1].

[0] https://www.geoguessr.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/GeoWizard

Very good! I like this a lot, my wife and I just spent 20 mins on it.

Thoughts:

There is too much USA, for people outside the USA. Multiple choice between different counties in the same US state becomes just guesswork, maybe that situation could be prevented. (Also, non-Americans don't know the abbreviations for most US states.)

It's too easy when the choices are too geographically diverse. Maybe the 'wrong' options could be selected based on a min + max distance from the location in the video, say 500km to 5000km.

Needs a pause button so I don't have to close the tab, or if there is one it needs to be more prominent.

This is so awesome! I love it. Completely enchanting. I did 100 and got 89 right; and saw a few places I had lived =)

I had a momentary flashback to playing Carmen Sandiego when I was a kid. It think this would be a great educational tool.

Some thoughts (in no particular order)...

* I had one repeat video (which I had gotten wrong the first time), and two videos of the Brandenburger Tor (Berlin).

* It's interesting how many of them have flags in the shot - were the shots selected this way on purpose? It made me think how often there are flags everywhere that we barely notice. That plus the writing system, plus which side of the road people are driving on, makes some of them fairly easy. I imagine you could make a more difficult level if you wanted to, just by increasing the number of multiple choice answers or making more of them be from the same country or region.

* I wish there was a way to share your score with friends.

Great project!

This is one of my favorite things I’ve seen on the internet in a while. Just so awesome. One thing I think that might be improved would be to prevent some situations where for example I was given as choices something like China, Vietnam, County A in West Virginia, County B in West Virginia. It clearly was in West Virginia (too easy), but which county was too difficult.

Cool, but... Where am I? I see a video, and some buttons for other locations. But it doesn't show what I am looking at in the current video. Is it a puzzle? You have to figure that out? If so, please say that somewhere.

Neat. The presence of flags makes it almost too easy :-)

It seems pretty similar to https://virtualvacation.us/guess (which I just run across earlier today), except you're asked to click on a map to solve instead of using multiple choice.

In the spirit of 'travel the world' and based on how I interpreted the city choice at first, I'd love for there to be a mode where you don't take a quiz but just choose where you go next.

I enjoy such videos, but find them problematic. I'd like to filter by bouncing-camera style vs no-bounce, or perhaps on degree of bounce. Avoiding-pan style vs slow pan vs pan vs swivel to interesting things. Interesting things can be fun, but... "fun, fun, fun, fun, zap ouch! - now I get to be queasy for an hour". So perhaps intra-video filtering, like automatic blackouts, or vr-like "given the current angular velocity, we'll gray out much of the display, narrowing the field of view to a smaller circle, to avoid sickness"? Can a plug-in see an embedded video to do optical flow? Perhaps a site already curating such videos might value-add some image analysis? Are there popular channels with moments problematic for some viewers, perhaps creating a persistent niche for a mediating middleman?

I've accidentally discovered that adjusting the sound volume from the keyboard exposes the title of the video in the popup: https://imgur.com/gallery/K3oUFlb

I often watch POV walking/biking videos when working out indoors (rambalac for Japan, prowalk tours for Italy/Europe, watched walker for London, …) and thanks to your site I’ve found a couple more channels I was not aware of: could you maybe have a page where you list all the channels you are using (with maybe the amount of videos from each)?

From a gaming standpoint maybe I would show the source button only after the user has made a guess, as well as having an auto play button that can be disabled in case the user just wants to play random POV videos as screensaver or keep watching for a while after guessing.

This would be super incredible inside a vr headset like quest. But i think the video resolution must be scaled a lot like 4k at least, 8k preferably for it be meaningful.

I actually did have an app that was kind of similar and it used to make you exercise in streets of paris, etc in first-person pov but the video resolution was so bad it just didn't work. But i am sure there will be a huge demand for this in vr as it gets more popular.

This is amazing. I think it'll make a good party game also, especially if the attendees are well-traveled or international.

edit: Would be amazing if you added a competitive mode also, where two or more parties would get the same series of videos (randomly generated from a unique URL or something). And see who can get the most points out of 100 or so. Even better of the options are labeled A-D and randomized so groups in the same room can discuss which one they want to pick without leaking information

Love this kind of walking around videos (I watch them in an old VR headset when I cannot fall asleep). I see it uses videos from YouTube, are they collected in a playlist somewhere? :)

This is my favorite channel on this subject https://www.youtube.com/c/rambalac

Very neat, it reminded me of the below link, which shows videos of driving through cities, while playing you a matching radio station from the area. https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

i love the idea. unfortunately probably due to my slow connection i get an extremely low resolution on the video making it very difficult to recognize any details because everything looks blurry. i'd rather have less or slower video but at a higher resolution. 360p at least. 480p would be better.

also, please check the browser language. due to my location i get city names in a language i can't read.

Awesome work! First time I played I got 50/55, generally I look for signs on the street, apart from the architecture of the place, how the people look and what language they speak. Naturally the US seems to be overrepresented, but on 4 of the questions I got wrong I was undecided between two american counties.

I have tried it three times and I find this way of teleporting very pleasant. I am particularly bad in geography, but it seemed to me that the places of some videos were sometimes particularly easy to identify. It's good when you feel lost. And the three times around the twenty videos I had a bug (with Firefox). And lost all my progress.

It should be interesting to have a seed system so that you can challenge other people.

This is perfect for a distributed team game via Zoom - if you can find a way to facilitate group guessing via mobile phone while the videos are shown on a video conferencing screen then I believe you have a hit on your hands.

Pretty easy. I'd would try adding a hard mode where the 3 wrong cities are geographically close to the correct city. So guessing "Asia" isn't enough to guess correctly.

Really cool experience and lots of fun while training/testing one's powers of observation and deduction. Did you harvest the clips manually?

I enjoyed watching this narrative-free stroll in exotic locales. I think this would be a great site to relax to before bed. Please add more places :)

Addictive! Would make for a great TV app (iOS/Android developer here). Multi-player each with their own controller to collect answers and reveal the winners.

This is really cool!

I got carried away playing, was super fun. Nice one OP!

Great game! That was really fun!

I would love to have the ability to copy-paste the results of how wrong or right I was after a set amount of games (like wordle)

This is really neat. I think if you had the geoguesser style of map or head-to-head competitions, it could really take off in the twitch streaming world.

Very nice! Just one comment: why do I have to wait 5 seconds? Sometimes the answer is clear before the end of this time.

This is amazing! Really fun. I would also love to see a more even distribution geographically, it’s currently very US/Europe/South American centric.

I watched somebody walk around in the rain at night for 10 mins before realizing this is Wordle-but-with-videos. Very peaceful.

This is awesome thanks! One thing I noticed is it's really US centric. Usually in my choices I got 4 USA locations and one non US place.

This was a lot of fun, thank you!

I especially appreciate the "Stay" button.

Really clean implementation -- nicely done!

Never ever ever ever initiate audio on the web without positive intent from the user.

I got 32 out of 33 :) The scripts, weather and the people are the telltale clues.

Beyond cool, thanks for this

When I click on a city it shows videos from a different city. On firefox

Well done... I can see a multi-user competition mode too (e.g. Kahoot!)

Good ice-breaker too.

I liked it! Similar to GeoGuessr. Logged in to give an upvote.

Could you add a setting to disable "autoskip"?

FFS this is so addictive.

Can see teams doing this as a fun icebreaker

The cherry blossom video is incredible.

This is lovely. Thanks for sharing!

This is fantastic, well done!

nice, where did you get the videos from?

I wasted 20 minutes on it. Cool!

This is pretty fascinating!!

cool site, confusing UX.

skip button isnt working for me in firefox 99.0